An hour after I finish writing this, I will be back at my desk at Virgin Money, ready to begin yet another challenging year. As ever, I’m hoping for a year of growth, both professionally and personally (except around the stomach). By developing my work skills old and new and striving to be an even better Dad/Husband, I want to look back at 2012 and feel that I’ve scaled another peak, however small. In the last couple of years, I have finally realised that I can’t do everything, that focus is important and that quality time with my family should never be sacrificed for work or study (which is why there was a dramatic decrease in my blogging last year).
I’ve also decided to do more things away from my computer and devices. So, here’s where I start to cook, read more ‘proper’ books (ie not just comics and web development titles) and keep my gym visits regular. I also want to master GarageBand and play more guitar with my son.
How much of the above real life actually lets me achieve, remains to be seen – I’ll let you know in 12 months. And whatever you have planned for 2012, I wish you every success and happiness. And here we go…
I saw this on YouTube and had to share – featuring Jane Lui, the fab Michael T on bass and Jonathan Batiste on the ivories. Clever clogs Joe Sabia directed it.
Last Friday I had the pleasure of attending Future of Mobile 2011. This fantastic one day event, held at London’s Mermaid Theatre, was packed to the rafters with top quality speakers flown in especially from around the world.
Over the course of the day, I learnt from Instagram’s co-founder Kevin Systrom, how it’s transformation from a previous product (Burbn) led to it’s fantastic success today; the wonderfully sweary Brian LeRoux of PhoneGap got through a lot of information in his detailed and informative talk about building cross platform native apps with HTML5 (I was really impressed by a really cool mobile dev debugger he’d created); Ribot’s Antony Ribot walked us through designing for different screen sizes (and how he’d turned his mother into an Angry Birds addict); Dominic Szablewski blew my mind with his HTML5 cross-platform games presentation (I spoke to him earlier about Flash’s future and he wasn’t optimistic – on the basis of his incredible presentation, I decided Adobe should be very afraid); Dave Verwer gave a great crash course on iOS development; Sencha’s James Pearce discussed the cross-platform mobile web, throwing up the day’s best statistic (38% of people admit to using their phones while on the toilet – the other 62% are liars); and finally the end panel (pictured above*) debated whether or not you should build a native or HTML5 app (conclusion: it depends).
Namedrop department: Over the course of the day, I managed to chat to some great people, all of them by chance. In the lunch queue, I chatted to the .net magazine team (Dan Oliver, Tom May and Oliver Lindburg) then later, when my conference buddy Jemma Mills and I were debating the merits of CSS3 vs Javascript for HTML5 mobile apps, Opera’s Bruce Lawson and Patrick H Lauke came up and put us straight. And I managed a quick one on one chat with Mr Carsonified himself, Ryan Carson, about Think Vitamin’s upcoming relaunch as Treehouse.
It was a brilliant, inspiration and informative day and I really can’t wait to attend another Carsonified event very soon.
* Left to right: James Pearce, Brian LeRoux, Tom Hume, Petra Soderling and Dan Appelquist.
On Monday, I met my fellow comics/culture fiend Mark W at the Design Museum’s Wim Crouwel A Graphic Odyssey. Guest curated by the brilliant Tony Brook of Spin (Hi Tony), this major retrospective of the Dutch design superstar’s work covers his entire career from his start in exhibition design to his role as elder statesman today. A large part of the exhibition covers work created for Total Design, the ground-breaking multidisciplinary firm he helped establish in 1963. This was a great thrill for me as I’d just spent last weekend reading TD 63 – 73, Unit Editions’ new book about Total Design and it was fantastic seeing the work close up. Afterwards, we headed for the shop and bought several pieces of Spin-designed exhibition collateral, but left while we still had enough money for the train fare home.
As soon as I laid eyes on Arne Bellstorf’s new graphic novel, Baby’s in Black, I knew it was my kind of book. It tells the story of photographer Astrid Kirchherr’s tragic love affair with original Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe during the band’s Hamburg days (and ironically borrows it’s title from the Beatles’ song about her). I’ve seen this story portrayed before in the movie Backbeat but what makes this book special is the fact that Bellstorf had direct access to Astrid Kirchherr and has written his book after hearing her story first hand. On certain pages the reported dialogue between Kirchherr and the Beatles feels so fresh and authentic you can almost hear their accents.
Bellstorf’s writing and illustration is first rate – the brilliantly cropped panels reveal a wealth of story telling detail, and the lovely, sketchy style of illustration is a joy to behold – this is probably the best graphic novel I’ve ever read.
Last week, Team K visited the Big Apple. If ever there was a city designed for my family, it’s New York City – it allowed us to do everything in our usual breakneck speed only over there it felt right. Apart from all the grief I got everyday from wearing my Boston Red Socks hat (imagine wearing a Man City scarf in the wrong part of Manchester right now) we were swamped with all the love that could pour out of the big red heart of the I ♥ NY logo. In just four short days we zipped around, bouncing off shops, restaurants, museums and usual tourist sites.
I’ve put some pics up on Flickr and some on Facebook, but I must warn you, they contain graphic scenes of gluttony, tall buildings and close ups of my stomach.
If there was anyone cooler than Serge Gainsbourg, I’ve yet to meet them. Serge left us for the great lounge in the sky twenty years ago today and I’m smoking a Gauloises in his honour.
Team K has just returned from a brilliant weekend in Bath. We were visiting our friends, Mark and Sophie who’ve been Bath-ers (or whatever the correct term is) for 12 years now. We’ve always said we’d visit, but when fellow comic fiend Mark mentioned Bath’s fab comic shop (American Dream Comics on Walcott Street) we were there before you could say ‘Shazam!’
We stayed just down the hill from Mark and Sophie at the fab Brooks Bed and Breakfast (aptly named as the bed was amazing and so was the breakfast – more toast anyone?) which was our home from home and the storehouse for all the goodies we bought while shopping. The girls got some great clothes and other bits and pieces, while Number One Son and I spent wisely and well on our usual diet of books and comics. The aforementioned American Dream Comics also sold American candy and cereal so we could have feasted on a lot more, but behaved ourselves, saving room for the great grub we ate in Bath. Ah, the food – apart from the great breakfasts in Brooks B&B (so good, I’ve had to mention them twice) Saturday found us having a yummy lunch in the Central Bar and Sunday lunch was a long and leisurely affair with Team K, Mark and Sophie in Jamie’s Italian. We also nibbled on Ben’s Cookies, Bath’s premier diet damager and, of course, we had to visit Pizza Express too (it’s in our contract – long story).
One of the many highlights of the trip was the visit to the Roman baths (top picture), where I made a great joke about Emperor Vesparian, being the Roman creator of the motorcycle, which strangely nobody found funny (that’s Mrs K, above, finding out if that joke is punishable by death). The baths themselves were amazing – even in our internet-fuelled shiny gadget-crazy world, you cannot fail to be impressed by the ingenuity of the Romans. Later in the gift shop, I was amazed to see a children’s book about ancient Rome illustrated by Sam Hiti! Of course, I snapped that up immediately.
Bath is a great place to get your geek on. Future Publishing, those wonderful people who publish two of my favourite magazines .NET and Tap! are based in Bath, as is Carsonifed, makers of web apps, organisers of the Future of Web Apps/Design conferences and also the creators of the online video tutorials from Think Vitamin, of which I am a member. So imagine my surprise and delight on our last day in Bath, when I bumped into to Mr Carsonified himself, Ryan Carson, on George Street. I introduced myself and we had a brief chat – what a nice guy. I then collected Mrs K and the kids who’d been skulking in Cath Kidson and we jumped in the K mobile and headed for home.
You may have heard, via Twitter or from one of your web designer friends perched on the ledge of an extemely high building sobbing uncontrollably, that Yahoo is ‘sunsetting’ Delicious. Which is corporate-speak for ‘thank you for everything you’ve done, please close the door on your way out’. The official word from Yahoo on the Delcious blog however, is that they are NOT shutting down Delicious, instead they are ‘…actively thinking about the future of Delicious… we believe there is a home outside the company that would make more sense for the service and our users. We’re in the process of exploring a variety of options and talking to companies right now…’ which translates as ‘thank you for everything you’ve done, please close the door etc etc’. No, actually it means that they are selling, not killing it – but if a buyer isn’t found and Delicious ends up pushing digital daises, where might it be best for you to re-home all of your Delicious bookmarks?
Many people have joined the mass exodus to Pinboard (above), myself included. This ‘anti-social’ bookmarking site, designed to reflect the initial simplicity and speed of Delicious, has a small, one-off fee of $9.16. And that’s at the time I’m writing this, this fee increases the more members it receives (hint: Join now). I’ve been using it for a couple of days and I really like it. Begin by importing your Delicious bookmarks and then configure it to mirror any new bookmarks you place on Delicious in the meantime. It also captures your ‘Read Later’ bookmarks to Instapaper. Wonderful! Other tidy little bookmarking sites you may enjoy include historio.us which allows you to create a personal search engine for your bookmarks, searchable through keywords with an interface that’s almost identical to Googles’. And it’s free until you go over 300 bookmarks; Trunk.ly (below) is simple, pretty and free and saves links from Twitter, Facebook and Delicious, very useful; BlinkList is touted on it’s own site as “like iTunes for web pages. Intuitive, easy to use and incredibly fast” – this is also free and allows migration from Delicious.
If you need more features and want to be part of a community, you could always try Diigo. Like the above sites, you can import your Delicious bookmarks and send new bookmarks to Delicious. As well as saving and sharing bookmarks, it saves ‘highlights’ (chunks of text from bookmarked pages), notes, ‘sticky’ notes, screenshots and pictures. Soon there will be the ability to save audio and other types of documents.
Diigo isn’t as pretty as Evernote or the fantastically beautiful and feature-packed Springpad (above) (which deserves a post of it’s own – watch this space), but in the couple of days that I’ve been playing with it, I think I prefer it’s simplicity. I love how the aforementioned page highlights are displayed as chunks of text under the relevant bookmark – amazingly useful when researching and writing as it affords quick access to the important snippets of copy you’ve emphasized.
But best of all is its ‘Preview’ option (above), which allows the viewing of saved web pages directly inside Diigo (via an accordian-like iframe) with the ability to follow any site links inside this pane. Diigo offers the usual toolbar and a bookmarklet for quick access to it’s main tools as well as a bespoke web highlighter for the iPad. There is also an offline reader for the iPhone and the ability to save to your Android device, too. What’s not to like? Only one thing – the pesky ads. But when you sign up for either a basic ($20 annually) or Premium account ($40 annually) these ads disappear.
Other community sites with extra features include faves, yourversion and the brilliant, gorgeous licorize (above) which like Springpad deserves a post all of it’s own (go look – you won’t regret it). If you are a designer who prefers a more visual experience, some bookmarking sites that may interest you include FAVable, vizited and wonderpage. And you’re probably already bookmarking sites and images with ember, zootool or the aforementioned Evernote. I also discovered a couple of interesting beta’s you might want to check out like Flinkin and the soon-to-be-launched favbot.
It’s a real shame about Delicious, but maybe it will find a home with a sympathetic buyer or it maybe it will be bailed out by it’s users with paid subscriptions. Whatever happens, hopefully you’ll find some of these alternate bookmarking sites of some use. Bookmark away, you fiends!
I really can’t believe that today is New Years Eve. It seems only five minutes ago that I woke up hungover and unsavoury on January 1st and now, boom, I’m writing this. 2010 was a milestone year for me as I turned 50, my birthday party being one of the many highlights of the year. Especially when Number One Son played ‘500 Miles’ with the now sadly defunct The Marketing-Tings, Virgin Money’s all-star band (of whom I was the humble bass player) who were providing the live music for the night.
2010 has been a comparatively laid back year, which has made a nice change, allowing me to have more quality time with Team K. And what times we’ve had – a trip to Amsterdam, seeing our family in Vancouver, many great visits to London and seeing Diversity in Birmingham. Number One Son and I have also had our own adventures; two shows at Wembley Stadium (Green Day, Muse) and a great camping weekend in North Norfolk. Of course, I’ve not negelected my inner geek, which is why I’ve also spent quality time learning jQuery, HTML5, CSS3 and development for mobile. My inner geek was also sated by my purchase of an iPad and the new iPhone 4 – both of which have improved my (digital) life.
I am so looking forward to next year – 2011 will be a much busier affair – the Virgin Money Studio is gearing up for the many large projects we have looming and I have many personal projects I want to complete (I’ve signed up to 43 Things to keep me on track). I expect it to be a challenging 12 months, with great progress made personally and professionally. Whatever you are dreaming of or planning in 2011, may I wish you the best of success and the greatest of happiness. Happy new year!
Number One Son wrote this updated version of the traditional Christmas song. Bursting with laughter and parental pride, I decided to illustrate it and share with it you (for the sake of brevity, however, I have just included the last verse).
On the twelfth day of Christmas,
My true love sent to me
Twelve Top Gear box sets,
Eleven football boots,
Ten Televisions,
Nine guitars,
Eight great books,
Seven Halo figures,
Six DVDs,
Five PSPs,
Four controllers,
Three cheat codes,
Two Xbox games,
And a Nintendo and a PS3!
Last weekend Team K went to Birmingham to see Diversity, winners of Britain’s Got Talent in 2009. They were brilliant, putting on an unbelievably energetic dance show, whizzing around the stage for two and a half hours. Mrs K and the young K’s really loved it and so did I.
In the morning before the show, we decided to go shopping. Fortunately for us, the Frankfurt Christmas Market, the largest outdoor Christmas market in the UK, was also visiting Birmingham. The Germans certainly know how to do Christmas – our mouths were watering as we wandered around the stalls selling fabulous candied nuts, stollen, gingerbread, crepes, chocolates, marzipan sweets, grilled sausages, pretzels, Gluhwein (mulled wine) and German beer. Other stalls were selling a beautiful selection of handmade toys, Christmas decorations and craft goods.
One stall sold tin toys, including some really cool robots. I love toy robots, especially tin ones, so it wasn’t long before I was waving my credit card around like a lightsabre and nabbed this fantastic robot pictured above. Made by Ha Ha Toy in China for the German company Alexander Blechspielwaren, this robot was a real blast from the past, reminding me of the great tin robots I used to own as a child. I also really loved the box graphics with it’s pastel colours and the brilliant little Ha Ha Toy logo, which reminded me of those bonkers little logos Barney Bubbles used to decorate his work with.
Birmingham’s Frankfurt Christmas Market runs until the 23rd December, and I recommend you visit if you can. And if you get to the tin toys stall early (like I did) maybe you will also get a free little wind-up toy tin chicken for being the first customer of the day!
A designer at Virgin Money, Steve Kirkendall does lots of luvverly creative stuff, when he’s not doing amends. This site is about graphic design, illustration, comics, animation and web design. But mainly, it’s about Steve Kirkendall.
If you want to say "Hi" mail him at:– steve at kirkendall dot co dot uk.
Steve K designed and built this on a Mac, using coffee, XHTML and CSS. Content management by Textpattern, hosting by Fasthosts. Steve K loves web standards, but he loves drawing more.
